CIPHER/TOOLS
Bench tools
17Every cipher on the loom ships with a working tool. These pages are the tools on their own, with the settings that suit each cipher best.
Alberti Disk
Leon Battista Alberti built a brass disk in the 1460s and, with it, crossed the line that separates classical from…
Atbash
Atbash folds the alphabet in half and glues A to Z, B to Y, C to X. There is no key at all — knowledge of the method…
Baconian Cipher
Francis Bacon's 1605 biliteral cipher is the first recorded binary encoding of an alphabet, three centuries before…
Book Cipher
A book cipher replaces the alphabet with a book. Every letter is written as a position — page, line, word, letter…
Caesar Shift
The oldest alphabet cipher most people meet first: every letter moves a fixed number of places down the alphabet. It…
Cardan Grille
Girolamo Cardano's grille is a sheet of stiff paper with holes cut in it. Lay it over a blank page, write the…
Columnar Transposition
Columnar transposition is the workhorse of classical field ciphers: simple enough to do with a pencil, strong enough…
Enigma Rotor Machine
Enigma is the cipher that looks unbeatable on paper and lost a war in practice. Its key space was in the…
Nomenclator
A nomenclator is half cipher, half dictionary. It substitutes letters as usual but also assigns its own codes to the…
Null Cipher
A null cipher does not disguise a letter — it hides which letters are the message. Every character in the…
Pigpen Cipher
Pigpen writes letters as fragments of a grid. Two tic-tac-toe frames and two X frames give exactly 26 cells, so the…
Playfair Square
Playfair was the first practical cipher to encrypt letter *pairs* rather than single letters, and that one design…
Polybius Square
Polybius did not invent a cipher. He invented a *notation*: a way to write any letter as two numbers between one and…
Porta Cipher
Giovanni Battista della Porta published this tableau in 1563 and solved a problem that had annoyed cryptographers…
Scytale
The scytale does not rename letters — it shuffles them. Wind a strip of leather around a wooden staff, write across…
Tironian Notes
Before ciphers abbreviated letters, they abbreviated *words*. Tironian notes were a Roman shorthand of several…
Vigenere Tableau
The Vigenere cipher was called *le chiffre indéchiffrable* — the indecipherable cipher — for roughly three hundred…
All of these run entirely in your browser. No key, no plaintext and no ciphertext ever leaves the page.